Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code

SOE's dungeon crawler adds online and new gameplay, but it still isn't nearly legendary.

When the first Untold Legends hit the PlayStation Portable, its grand-scale adventure was many times more expansive than what most portable game owners were used to. Its realtime RPG combination of fast-paced action and complex character customizing also fit well in the handheld, bringing new life to a genre that was fast wearing out its welcome on consoles. No wonder that, even though it felt rushed to meet the PSP launch, the game went on to be one of the top sellers of the new system. Untold Legends quickly established itself as a key franchise for Sony Online Entertainment, with the new PS3 Dark Kingdom and the long-awaited and significantly enhanced PSP sequel.

For Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code, SOE is in many ways delivering the game we all wanted Brotherhood of the Blade to be. It's got online multiplayer, it's got more modern storytelling and production values, and it has more fleshed-out gameplay design. But as far as Untold Legends has come in this sequel, so has the PSP's game library. So many of the additions are outclassed by other games it is competing with that, as a whole, Warrior's Code still feels incomplete and rushed. For dungeon crawler fans, it holds the allure of a portable epic as you slog through marshes and battle online rivals. Most others, however, will really have to consider whether they wait for Untold Legends to get it right on console or the next PSP adventure.

While Brotherhood of the Blade made by with the bare minimum in storytelling and presentation elements (still picts and text for 30 hours of dialog ... good times), this second Untold Legends steps things up significantly. There are FMV sequences at major chapter marks, voices for all of the major characters you meet and even in-game cinematics at various points of the story. It's still a ways off from PS2-quality in how often and how well-directed the cutscenes tend to be, but it's a big step up. Usually, that is. Using the in-game characters from a hack-and-slash doesn't always work to its advantage, with fighters that look great at a distance suddenly seeming small and cartoonish in dialog scenes. And the scripting for these scenes is still all over the map in terms of budget. The opening of the game has an FMV intro before dumping you in the middle of a sewer with nothing but text dialog to set up the rest of the story; similarly, one scene shows off sharp animation of two toothy ogres arguing, while the very next sequence has an auto-cam that shows nothing but a wooden door as you try to talk with a locked-up prisoner.

For The Warrior's Code, effort went into driving the gameplay in new and more complex ways. Being that the realtime RPG is usually knocked for being a button-mashing fest, anything to get us off the attack button is a plus. Some of those efforts pay off big, others go nowhere, and unfortunately, one big one promises to be cool but, because of wonky design, is nearly broken in actual use.

The heartbreaker is the Attack of Opportunity maneuver, a new addition where, if an enemy stalls or is stunned, you have the chance at a significantly powerful attack. In theory, it's brilliant -- there are three different Attacks of Opportunity, depending on how fast you are with triggering the attack and what kind of trick you want to pull. Choose wisely and move fast, because if you hold the button for too long, you may miss your Opportunity window. Attack of Opportunity gives tuned-in players choices in combat, and it changes how you approach certain enemies -- a giant mallet-swinging ogre, for instance, will likely get his weapon stuck in the ground if you engage him at a near distance, while a spinning Mine Sower moves too fast for most attacks but will always have to stop (if you give it just enough room to feel safe from your blade) to lay its mines.

Neat idea, in theory. So what's the problem? The context-sensitivity of Attack of Opportunity is so unresponsive that it's almost never worth using. You almost have to be right on top of the enemy to start charging the Attack of Opportunity, and if you begin hold down the button too far away (you usually have to use the whole stun time to get a Loot Quake, so it's an easy mistake to make), it won't start charging when you do get into the sensing range. It's also buggy, so sometimes the charge doesn't start when you're within a proper distance, again losing time on your charging. Often, it's easier to just tap the button for the powerful single-strike, or else use the stunned moment to wail away regular attacks. It's a feature that's supposed to add player reflexes to a genre that otherwise feels mindless at times, but if you have to make assumptions for when and where the computer will recognize your attack, it doesn't work.

You get the feeling that the other big addition, the Changeling form where you turn into a beast, was similarly never thought out fully. So, I can turn into a cat or a beastman or a ... I know the manual calls it a Fury, but I can't help looking at the droopy ears on this one critter and not think "Muppet". That's neat the first few times, until you realize that there's no advantage to beast form besides slightly stronger attacks. By the time you've bought blades doing 80 hits per turn (and often with a much wider attack range or a faster hit rate), your beast form becomes woefully outclassed and unnecessary. You also don't have access to any of your powered-up magic once in beast form, with only your standard attack and one magic charging technique. You don't get to see anything special in the stage when you're in your Changeling form, you get no set of custom moves to experiment with, and you don't get any health or power boost by becoming a Muppet. Why bother?